With Brando’s departure, the rest of the precisionists scattered: Tardi and two others, Carreras and Benvenuto, fell in with the neoclassicists. Benvenuto started to specialize in German romanticism and eastern philosophy. Tardi and Carreras ended up on the editorial committee for Espiga, which was last published in 1950. Among the other four, two abandoned literature completely, and of the two who were left, one moved to Buenos Aires and the other one committed suicide sometime later (it was rumored that he was a pedophile). There was less activity in the literary world, and politics seemed to be the main topic of conversation. Members of the opposition spoke in low voices, like conspirators, and those who had joined the government or the official party pontificated openly, demonstrating their enthusiasm. Gamarra, who refused to join the party, arguing that he was apolitical, lost his post at the university, and thanks to his relationships at the Alianza Francesa, went to live in France. The regionalists were also divided. One, who had been an anarchist, ended up joining the communist party after Cuello joined the official party. Among the neoclassicists, two or three radical Catholics joined the government, but the rest, who’d joined the opposition, claimed that El Gran Conductor had a brain tumor—in the sella turcica of the sphenoid bone, to be precise—and didn’t have long to live. Somehow, everyone kept publishing chapbooks and hardcover editions and individual poems in literary supplements. But the era of the precisionist dinners and the Friday cookouts at the San Lorenzo grill house had come to an end.
Every so often there was news of Brando. Someone had seen him in Trastevere, driving around in an Alfa Romeo. Someone else thought they’d heard, though they couldn’t quite remember from whom, that he was summering in Sicily. The elder Brando, who was now too old to accompany Cuello around the islands, but who had a cookout with him every so often, and who’d taken to calling his son Il Dottore, said that Lydia had just had a baby girl and that the post at the embassy left them plenty of time to travel. In 1950, Lydia had another daughter, but, according to the first lieutenant (who was a captain by then), who’d run into Gamarra once on a bus to Buenos Aires, they were getting tired of being away from their family, and Lydia didn’t want their grandparents to die without knowing their granddaughters.
Most Tuesdays at eleven in the morning, Tardi would pass by the Highway Administration, where Benvenuto worked, to meet him for a cup of coffee at the corner bar. Once, Benvenuto was waiting for him with a copy of the previous Sunday’s La Prensa (which had been banned by the government). There was an article by Brando in the rotogravure. He’s worth his weight in gold! Benvenuto had said, brandishing the rolled-up newspaper. While Benvenuto finished organizing some forms, Tardi read it, shaking his head and issuing surprised, scandalized laughter every so often. It was an essay on Dante, written practically at the foot of the Florence Cathedral. According to Brando, contemporary literary language was like Latin in the era of Dante: it was dead. De vulgari eloquentia, and if it couldn’t stand up as a valid program, it had, nevertheless, the value of a universal token inasmuch as it demonstrated with clarity that every great poet should forge his own language. Dante couldn’t express himself with precision in Latin; he needed a new language. Given this, he didn’t go against his time at all, because he’d adopted the language of his time. Without shrill, false rebellions he’d managed to express a complete philosophical system. That had cost him more than one hardship. For instance, his disciples, his friends, his group Dolce Stil Novo, were no doubt unable to stand it that Dante, elevating himself above doctrinal squabbles, and above the limited reach of every little courtesan poet, would have dared to take on, in his great philosophical poem, all knowledge, both human and divine. Yes, but Dante was forced into exile, and he lives off the fat of the dictatorship, Tardi exclaimed, throwing the paper on the table and lowering his voice slightly when offering that aside.
The elder Brando died in late 1950. In the final years he may have glimpsed the reason for his repudiation of his ancestors, the ones who had Taine for dinner and led him through a labyrinth of palazzi: it was a kind of melancholy. He ended up taking with him to his grave the interior chuckle with which, not without some compassion, he regarded the known universe. The following autumn, Brando and his family arrived from Italy. According to Cuello, who knew one of his brothers-in-law, an agronomist who managed some family farms near Malabrigo, Brando, while still in Rome, had demanded that all actions concerning the inheritance be frozen until his arrival, and so no one touched a paper, but when Il Dottore arrived (always according to Cuello, who was sarcastic yet incapable of slander), the first thing he did was burn the manuscripts of his father’s realist novels. Everything else, which he was not indifferent to after all, came second.
He never left again. According to him, family complications kept him home, but coincidentally, a few months later, soon after an aborted coup, the general retired, and the embassy was never spoken of again. Brando did not seem too upset. The polish of his gold accessories was now supplemented by the splendor of his time in Europe, giving him, that winter, a particular luster. That veneer remained forever, and even for those who knew him later, the new generations of poets who didn’t care much either for precisionism or its inventor, it worked. Brando was one of those people who exemplified better than most, from a sort of personal density, the old idea that all men are unique. He was recognizable from a distance; his arrival was always remarked; his presence was never ignored. And, once he had been seen, it was immediately understood why six or seven poets, some even older than him, had given themselves to his aesthetic doctrines, and for several years had put themselves almost exclusively at his service. The poets who publicized his tenets or typed up his poems must have found, in his compact soul, a possible model for counteracting the uncertainty of their own beings and the interminable afternoons. It had nothing to do either with ethics or with literary talent, nor with any particular capacity for seduction, because, in that regard, Brando was in no way industrious or demanding. In fact the opposite could be said: he was someone who rarely, if ever, demonstrated his affection, and his relations with people consisted rather of an icy and seemingly distracted courtesy. The contradictory nature of his principles was immediately obvious, given that it would never have occurred to him to conceal his irreconcilable inclination for scientistic poetry and social position within the heart of the philistine bourgeoisie. If he read his disciples’ poems it was, invariably, in order to tear them to pieces in the name of the precisionist aesthetic; if he published them in the magazine it was, unequivocally, because they clearly demonstrated that the hand of the chef de file had given them their final touch. To the company of poets he preferred that of rich and illiterate frivolous attorneys from the Club del Orden, that of Rotarian doctors, and that of neat, brutal, and shaven-headed horsemen of the Círculo Militar. If he went for coffee with some local writer who survived on a meager pension from some public office, he, who had considerable assets and who upon returning from Europe had left his old law firm in order to start his own, always managed to make himself invisible when the check came. It was difficult to imagine him in those tasks or positions that are the burden or delight of most other humans: defecating, fornicating, cutting his toenails, relating in some way or another to contingency. Every so often, an extremely faint scatological echo, which one had to be very alert to perceive, vibrated in his conversation. Whenever he made an observation that he considered keen, and which often were, he would sit for several seconds, as I’ve said before, staring at his interlocutor, waiting for his reaction. But, otherwise, it was impossible to meet his gaze. He was always looking at something over your shoulder, if he was taller than you, and at the knot of your necktie, if he was shorter. To be more precise, it should be said that what he actually had were listeners and not interlocutors. When he stopped speaking and the conversation passed to the other party, to what might be called the external field, his eyes, which were large and brilliant while he talked, narrowing, clouded over or shut down. And, all the s
ame, three or four months after his arrival, in June or July of 1951, the precisionist machine began to function once again.
An article in La Región, in mid July, outlined the theoretical precepts of the second volume. Its theme was the decadence of the west, manifested in the irrationality of thought and the increasing relevance of the masses in historical events. If he goes on like this, he’ll end up publishing for Reader’s Digest, someone had told Benvenuto, who, however, received the sarcasm with constraint. In some ways, Brando’s article coincided with two of his favorite theories, namely that a first, enlightened romanticism had been distorted after the fact by one that was irrational and vulgar, and, meanwhile, that the decadence of the west, which was an incontrovertible fact, confirmed the supremacy of eastern thought. Furthermore, Benvenuto perceived, in Brando’s article, certain veiled critiques of the government. For several days, Benvenuto asked himself whether or not he should call Brando to suggest a meeting at a symbolic and neutral location, the restaurant behind the market, for instance, but in the end coincidence took care of that, when, one afternoon, coming out of his office, he ran into Brando as he was walking through the door. The two men embraced on the sidewalk, under the lukewarm July sun, and walked together two or three blocks, talking about the past, about their friends, about Leonardo da Vinci, and about Chinese jurists. After remarking on the suicide of R, Benvenuto learned that Brando had been aware of his problems, and that on two or three occasions R had come to see him, deeply depressed, and that Brando had tried to calm him down. (Less sympathetic versions asserted that Brando, after hearing R’s more or less veiled confessions, had demanded that he remove himself from the movement.) According to Benvenuto, in his final days, R lived on uppers and barely slept. He’d spend whole nights walking through the city and in the morning would go straight to work, without going to bed. Brando asked Benvenuto about Tardi, and suggested that they get together for a cookout at the house in Guadalupe, where he’d moved after he got back from Rome (and where, meanwhile, he continued to live until his death). Noticing Benvenuto’s hesitation, Brando asked for the numbers of Tardi and other former members and said that he would call them himself, which would discharge Benvenuto from a difficult task, making things much easier, because if Brando himself was in charge of making contact with the other precisionists a reconciliation would be much more likely. And so, two Sundays later, at around eleven, the precisionists from 1945 that were left in the city, along with their families, began to arrive for the cookout at the villa in Guadalupe.
A surprise was waiting for them: Captain Ponce himself was preparing the cookout. He’d arrived the day before from Córdoba, where his regiment was stationed, due to one of those unexpected troop movements, since his headquarters were in the south. The continuous punishment of the Patagonian wind had removed his frail look and had given him the consistency of leather. He greeted them cheerfully, with a glass in his hand, but worried about the progress of the coals. He himself had brought the demijohns of Caroya wine that were one the table, and he filled their glasses with generosity and insistence, under Brando’s slightly reproving gaze.
Also present was a stranger to the historical precisionists, a Doctor Calcagno. He was a serious, almost sad, and well-educated man, and although he was several years older than Brando, he seemed intimidated by him and acquiesced to everything he said, even to things he didn’t seem to agree with. He taught Roman Law at the university and enjoyed a considerable reputation in his specialty, and two or three years after Brando left his old firm in order to start his own they became partners and were never separated again. Calcagno was like Brando’s silent and obedient shadow. He accepted everything, and even Tardi, who had been almost literally Brando’s servant during the first period of the precisionist movement, was scandalized by so much submission, possibly feeling irritated that as of that day Brando would prefer Calcagno’s servitude to his own. The firm made a lot of money, but while Brando kept a few cases for himself, which he managed personally, at the margin of the firm, Calcagno was the one who took on all of the work, something which would have been more or less understandable if the reason had been to leave Brando free time for his literary activities, but Calcagno also took on all of the practical work for the movement, editing, distribution, public events, proofreading, correspondence. Even years later, when he married a much younger woman, Calcagno still maintained that religious obedience to Mario Brando. What’s curious is that Calcagno wasn’t even a writer, and, moreover, that he was an honest man, but even when Brando, who’d become a provincial minister after the revolution, had to resign his post due to obscure accusations of corruption that were never completely clarified, and which, despite his opportunism, prevented him from ever aspiring to a public post again, Calcagno, whose honesty was unquestionable, continued to support him till his death.
With that cookout, precisionism’s second institutional era, after the announcement in La Región and Brando’s article, was inaugurated. Brando, upon his return from Europe, must have badly needed the restoration of the group, because otherwise he wouldn’t have invited his disciples and their families and everything else to the house in Guadalupe. It was a gesture of reconciliation that would not be repeated. Once he was assured of the collaboration of the three or four poets from the old guard, he went back to meeting them at peripheral and depressing bars and restaurants. His social life, meanwhile, took place at his house and in the houses of his rich and ignorant friends, at the Jockey Club, or in political circles, although, as the regime lost popularity, and though he’d had a diplomatic post in Rome, he started to move imperceptibly toward the side of those who, three or four years later, after a couple of aborted coups, would end up overthrowing it. The only person who shared both worlds with him was his faithful shadow, Doctor Calcagno.
Even Brando’s most intransigent enemies admired his political opportunism. Over five or six years he’d managed to be named cultural attaché in Rome by one government, to spend several years in Europe with his family, on a diplomatic salary, without any sort of declaration or public stance, and even without seeming to carry out any political activity, and then, just after the provincial inspector formed the first cabinet after the coup, he was asked to take the post of Secretary of Public Works. Had it not been for that obscure embezzlement incident, which was never clarified, and which had no other consequence for him than his retirement from politics, it was almost certain that a national trajectory awaited him.
What interested him was poetry and science, and astronomy in particular. At the house in Guadalupe, in a kind of tower at the back of the garden, which served as his office, he’d built an observatory where he’d shut himself up every night. Apart from Calcagno, who often went to visit him, very few people had enjoyed the privilege of an invitation. But from some poet or journalist from Buenos Aires, which is to say, anyone who could spread, beyond the city, his image as poet and scholar of art and science, a visit was particularly appreciated. After the coup, when he was Secretary of Public Works, in the photo that accompanied an interview with him, he was seen bent over, looking at the sky through the telescope. What’s surprising is that the story, which occupied a whole page, came out in La Prensa, after its legitimate owners recovered the paper, and despite the fact that he’d published his “Meditation at the Foot of the Florence Cathedral” while the newspaper, seized by the government, had been transformed into an official organ. Someone once said that Brando didn’t own an umbrella because when it rained he was able to walk through the drops without getting wet. What one had to admit, according to this same person, and to several others, including some of his enemies, was his fidelity to poetry, though it was rumored that when he wasn’t writing precisionist texts he wrote more traditional poems that very few people, if anyone, had seen, and through which he hoped to save his reputation if precisionism ever fell out of fashion.
This may have been an error on his part, because precisionism was an authentic local product, the most original li
terary movement in a city that, since romanticism and even since Góngora, had always welcomed every artistic novelty, adapting it to the regional climate and incarnating it in a local artist. We produced romantic poets in quantities greater than it would have been prudent to desire, and a story from the same movement, “The Novel of a Pale Young Man,” even appeared almost simultaneously with the first wave of realist and later naturalist novels, from which the group of regionalist writers captained by Cuello and Righi emerged. Symbolism and French poetry circulated thanks to modernismo, and, as I mentioned above, its last representatives, in the sixties, could still recite Belisario Roldán’s discourses by heart. In the forties, at the local level, the first surrealists began to appear, along with mystics and orthodox neoclassicists, who gathered around the magazine Espiga. We also had writers who practiced social realism, expressionism, what you might call a virile North American style, the objective novel, and even the writing, the practical life, and the physical appearance of the Beat generation. Every one of these movements had begun somewhere else, had traveled the world, and had ended up winning some acceptance in the city. Only precisionism had been born here, whatever the political or moral convictions of its inventor may have been, if he had any, and, likewise, whatever credit its creator may have given to his creation. Mario Brando, precisionism, and the city were as inseparable in the minds of the literary critics from Buenos Aires or Asunción or Montevideo as the three elements of the trinity probably were to Christian theologians. Anyone with a personal conception of literature wasn’t intimidated by Brando’s success in the forties and fifties (later, in the third period, he was already somewhat forgotten), and many local personalities who understood the deserved rejection of their own mediocrity before the eternal injustice of Buenos Aires toward the interior identified with the recognition that Brando and his poetic school enjoyed, and felt proud to have it as the fame of the city. They were local products like river fish, like Coronda strawberries, like the suspension bridge, and, later, like the underwater tunnel. At last, an author from the city wasn’t writing about the landscape or the flora and fauna characteristic to the region, but rather about universal relations that, according to precisionist theory, should exist between poetics and scientific language. As dubious as the aesthetic may have been, there was no doubt that it found attentive and objective interest in its time.
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